By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Spring 2018

On a February night, GW sophomore women’s rowers Carson Shehab and Emily Spencer have come to the Smith Center to learn to make a pomodoro-ish sauce. Overseen by Lauren Trocchio, a registered dietitian contracted by the university to minister to its more than 500 athletes, and proctored by GW caterer Maria Iturralde (of Creative Catering DC), these cooking classes instruct athletes how to eat healthy away from the training table. Teach a man to fish and what have you.

Both transfers, Shehab (Tennessee) and Spencer (Syracuse) came from programs employing sports-specific dietitians. College athletic departments started hiring them in the mid-1990s, and as of spring 2017, according to the Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians Association, 73 universities had fulltime sports dietitians on staff, and that doesn’t include the dietitians, like Trocchio, who work as consultants.

“A lot of growth happens when the coaching carousel turns and coaches go to new schools and go, ‘Hey, where’s my [sports dietitian]?’” says Chelsea Burkart, who is president of the CPSDA, the professional organization of sports dietitians. Founded in 2010, it has more than 1,200 members. Having been helped by sports dietitians in the past, Shehab and Spencer have turned evangelistic about a trend that’s becoming the norm.

“I always believed sugar was bad,” Spencer says. “I had to be convinced that this is a tool you can use—and that didn’t happen by me reading a book one day. That was something my previous dietitian had to explain to me.”

Spencer says she learned from her Syracuse sports dietitian that sugary fruit snacks offer quick energy boosts and that she rows better with a mid-practice granola bar.

“I bring it into the boat with me, which is kind of uncommon, because I worked with this dietitian and I know that two hours without me eating anything isn’t good,” Spencer says. “I actually perform better with something in between.”

At GW, in addition to hosting the periodic cooking demos—they draw about 30 athletes a session and teach, among other things, nutrition and knife skills—Trocchio gives team talks, devises pre- and post-game meals, advises on road-trip menus and counsels athletes one-on-one.

“We have big team meetings where we discuss how to properly fuel before practice,” Shehab says. “When you wake up, it’s so important to eat something, even though you don’t want to. She tells us what we should be eating for what type of workout it is, how we should be refueling afterwards, and we also talking about foods that are sustainable”—she means food that bodies can use for a long time—“and how you should grocery shop.”

Nutritional specifics for athletes vary by sport and by athlete. Individualization is important, as Spencer learned. Before she settled on the pre- and mid-practice granola bar, she tested a smoothie. It just made her sick.

“We know that people respond differently to different foods,” says Trocchio, alluding to digestion and body chemistry. “We know that one athlete might be fine with steak and potatoes, and another athlete—there’s no way they could tolerate it.”

In general, an ideal plate for a college athlete is one half good carbohydrates (brown rice, whole grains, unskinned potatoes), a quarter lean protein and a quarter vegetables. But Trocchio’s approach is a temperate one. She encourages athletes to aim for what she describes as an 80-20 diet.

“Eighty percent of the time, it’s choosing foods that are better for performance and healthy and 20 percent of the time making room for their favorites,” says Trocchio, a former distance swimmer at the Coast Guard Academy. Today, she’s a lieutenant commander in the reserves after spending eight years on active duty. “I definitely don’t take an all-or-nothing approach with them.”

Conferring with Trocchio isn’t mandatory, and coaches use her in various ways and to various extents. Some have her talk for 15 minutes every week. Others prefer bigger presentations less often, and some don’t use her at all.

Trocchio, who has her own clinic, Nutrition Unlocked, in Arlington, Va., was hired in 2015 and she says the team talks and menu planning are the obvious parts of her job, but that 75 percent of what she does is psychology. She’s even mused about supplementing her dietetics education with a psych degree.

Diet changes are lifestyle changes, and when body image is involved, consultations can turn delicate. Eating disorders and disordered eating are as common among college athletes as they are among civilians.

About 10 percent of the general population has an eating disorder, according to the National Eating Disorder Association. Trocchio, citing research, says the number is only slightly higher among college athletes, about 15 percent. That includes anything from a clinically diagnosed illness to an athlete unintentionally undereating.

“On the weight front,” Trocchio says, using an example. “I don’t want to tell them that weight doesn’t matter, but for different sports, there are clearly different body types that excel in different sports. There is no exact number or weight or body fat that you have to have to be healthy or a good athlete in your sport. That’s probably a message that has to get told again and again for it to stick, and it’s a message that has to come from everybody: coaches, strength coaches, dietitians, trainers.

“It’s a big part because body image drives a lot about how people choose to eat, so it’s hard to tell someone to eat a certain way if they have a certain idea of how they look or what they should look like. They’re not going to take your suggestion if we haven’t resolved that component.”

It’s about developing trust. Spencer says that’s how her dietitian at Syracuse convinced her to make changes. The SU dietitian, Spencer says, understood that she has an empirical mind and presented studies to sway her. “The element of trust came from the fact that she’d been working with our team for a while,” says Spencer, a political philosophy major before she transferred to GW. “She was in this position and she had worked with our team psychologist and she was trusted by friends.”

In 1994, Nebraska became the first school to hire a full-time dietitian. By 2004, six schools employed one, and by the end of the decade, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which oversees the credentialing of registered dietitians, introduced a sports dietitian certification. Ten years after that, it’s almost a given that a Division I college athletic department would employ a dietitian, a logical complement to strength and conditioning coaches and trainers.

Burkart, CPSDA president and a sports dietitian at Texas State, foresees every D-I university having a sports dietitian in the near-to-semi-distant future and every Power 5 conference school having one in next year or two. The reason for the imminent saturation, she says, is a slow-burning philosophical shift.

“[A dietitian] doesn’t fit the old-school paradigm or mentality of, Pull-up your bootstraps and run another lap,” Burkart says. “That is in contrast to, If I can fuel you better, you can run another lap. Yes, mental toughness is never going to go away, and it’s incredibly important, but we can also blend it with the importance of sports science.”

In 2014, the NCAA ruled on the related issue of how much and how often a university could feed its athletes. A three-year push by administrators, coaches, players and the CPSDA convinced college athletics’ governing body to soften the longtime standard of three meals a day. This allowed for unlimited meals and snacks and more individualized diets.

The CPSDA pursued the change in the name of student welfare—with job creation for a fledgling industry as a perhaps less-than-serendipitous side effect. GW offers breakfast daily for its athletes and a snack bar on Wednesdays as well the several-times-a-semester cooking classes, from which the athletes take home leftovers.

“I’m learning by preparing food myself and listening to Lauren,” Shehab says of Trocchio, “and I can apply it to myself when I’m older and now. I know how to meal prep. I know how cook things properly. It’s more about getting real-life ready.”

Ostensibly, the reason for the hiring of sports dietitians is the maximization of athletic performance. That’s certainly a reason why Burkart and Trocchio got into the profession but not the reason. Shedding a tenth of a second off a 40-yard-dash time is just the byproduct of the pursuit of a grander purpose.

“Everyone talks about nutrition for performance—and that’s important and that’s kind of the standard line,” Trocchio says. “But, honestly, when I come here and I talk to these athletes, I’m just trying to teach them how to eat and give them good lifelong nutrition habits.”

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